Lament what Shawne Merriman became, but please also remember what he once was.

In his peak years, few as they were, he was almost what he predicted he would be.

“I play the game to be the best,” Merriman told me in 2006, prior to his second season in the NFL. “When I'm all said and done, whatever year it is, I want to be looked at as the best linebacker that ever played and as a linebacker who changed the game.”

He would have 17 sacks in 12 games in 2006. And his ‘07 season, played mostly on a bum left wheel, was the best I have personally witnessed on a weekly basis in terms of all-around linebacker play.

Between 2005 and 2007 he had 39½ sacks, a half-sack shy of the NFL record for the first three seasons of a career.

So what? Three years does not a great career make.

OK. It was still pretty damn amazing.

So many that have derided Merriman as his career melted as a result of injury and amidst the cloud of steroid use worshiped him the five-plus seasons he was a Charger.

We were privileged to watch him.

Merriman on Tuesday announced via his web site that he is finished with his NFL career.

“My retirement from the game I love so much and from the game that has brought me so many great opportunities on and off the field has been decided with great thought for my future on and off the field," Merriman wrote on the site, going on to say he is retiring on his “own terms.”

I talked at length with Merriman at the Super Bowl last month. He was emphatic about how healthy he was and how ready he was to continue to play.

But that’s Merriman -- a contrast in words and action.

It didn’t used to be that way, and that is what I hope we can at least appreciate.

The “best linebacker ever” quote from 2006 referenced above is one I might have not used in 2005, his rookie season and my first year on the Chargers beat. He said so many seemingly outlandish things in ’05 that I felt compelled to protect him from himself.

But he so often backed up what had seemed boasts that I quickly came to believe he could back up virtually anything he said.

Among the things he predicted for 2005 that I didn’t immediately write: he would make the Pro Bowl; he would have double-digit sacks; he would hit people in a manner that would never be forgotten.

All three came true, including his smash of Priest Holmes that all but ended the Kansas City Chiefs running back’s career.

Then came an even more impressive 2006 – interrupted, of course, by the four-game suspension for a positive test for a performance enhancing drug that Merriman claimed was the result of a tainted legal supplement -- and ’07 seasons.